Going to shoot great, great, grandpas colt!

wow! To have that gun come to you through family from great,great!? Too cool. And...that pistol looks GOOD!

Mark

Paddy said:

The gun was fun to shoot. Not particularly accurate...

Click to expand...

I guess at the time that's all they had. Hard to imagine hunting or making war with those things. Took a lot of guts.

I perform what I think of as a Water Jug Test on all of my new .32-20 firearms.

I save up milk & distilled water gallon jugs. I fill them with water, line up 13-15 on the back patio and quickly squeeze-off 6 rounds into the end jug ... then collect the bullets.

This allows me to inspect & measure the bullets.

By this method I determined that the groove diameters on my Colts are .313"max, my S&Ws .312"max and my Marlin 27-S rifle .311"max ... and with this information I can select the best diameter bullet for each firearm.

Paddy said:

Finally got it to the range and blasted away some ooooold cob webs in the bore! First time shooting black powder. Boy does it smell! Gross! The gun was fun to shoot. Not particularly accurate.

Then I got it home. Of course I had forgotten to bring the olive oil to douse it out with before shooting. So it was mucked up pretty bad after just 20 rnds. So I soaked it for a few weeks and that helped it break down quite a lot. Then the good news! A lot of the "pitting" in the barrel I had seen for years mysteriously came out! The bore looks a lot better than I had thought! The crud from some previous grandpa had caked on good and hard and my regular solvents and brushes wouldn't touch it, but the olive oil was able to loosen it up considerably so the brush was able to remove. How cool?!

Not sure if I can keep going with black powder though, it's just too gross and too much work. I do feel that a nice reduced smokeless load would be fine in this piece so I will probably try that at some point, despite it being forbidden. I mean, I can't say for sure but I'd be willing to bet that this gun has seen plenty of factory smokeless ammo over the years. You know, before the Internet could tell us how bad our ideas are!

Click to expand...

You may see some accuracy improvement now that you have a clean bore. Is the rifling clean and sharp?

Some people love the smell of black powder. Some don't. It is probably an acquired taste. Give it a chance.

Trail Boss was invented for CASS (Cowboy Action Shooting Sports) and runs at a fairly low pressure, but even better would be to use one of the actual black po0wder substitutes on the market. They produce less smoke, less smell and run at the same pressures that BP does.

I am looking forward to your next range report.

Are there any stories you could share of your forebear where he might have carried this gun (or had any participation in, with or without firearms) our country's history? Could he have ridden with any posse chasing a bad guy, gone on a cattle drive, opened new land or blazed new trails...stuff like that?

Thanks for sharing.

Here's a good article on loading the .32-20. http://www.leverguns.com/articles/paco/3220wcf.htm
One of my favorite cartridges to shoot.

Trail Boss isn't a bad idea but there are fairly new BP replacements available that don't have a hard clean up or the fouling of real BP.

Alliant makes a good one, Black MZ.
http://www.alliantpowder.com/products/powder/blackmz.aspx

VERY nice revolver and some great history. You are very lucky.

Paddy, looks good! You can smear crisco into the lube grooves for a lube.
I shoot 2f in my 45 colt. I pan lube with 50/50 beeswax/olive oil.
Clean up: windex with vinegar squirt on patch and run it down the barrel, you'll be surprised! With cylinder removed, squirt it real good in the chambers let it sit while working on the barrel.
Not sure of your alloy for bullets, but accuracy might improved with softer bullet.

Paddy, if you want to give black a try again I've found that 17 gr. under a 115 boolit lubed with spg and .125" compression works well enough. I'm using brass at 1.28" in length.

Lubing the cylinder bushing and the part of the frame the bushing rides against after 15 rounds will enable you to shoot a little more before a more thorough field strip cleaning.

Trailboss is your friend here. Its made for these types of applications. Will be a whole lot cleaner than any BP or BP substitute. Just be sure not to compress the loads. I have been using TB for a number of different cartridges for the past few years and been extremely happy with the results.

Very nice.
A note on smokeless powder. It is not only the amount of pressure that the load produces. It is the way that the pressure is applied.
Smokeless powder has a very sharp, short pressure spike. Think of it as a hammer blow as opposed to steady pressure. Your non- heat treated cylinder is not made for that!

Black powder is real easy to clean. Just use hot soapy water, in the barrel, and soak the cylinder, while you are cleaning the barrel. No big deal. You can actually clean BP faster than modern powder. You can even get by with one cleaning patch as your patch will come out clean, when the BBL, and cylinder are clean. Hold the gun upside down while cleaning the bbl, and the water will not go into the action. After its clean run some Balistol thu the barrel, and cylinder, and squirt some in the action also. Done.

Most black powder substitutes are highly corrosive, much more so than BP, especially Pyrodex, and Tripple 7, they are also harder to clean.

Don't be scared of BP. Most of what non BP users tell you is a myth. Shoot BP, and have fun, the way it was designed to.

I would not shoot ANY modern powder in that revolver, if you want to keep it in one piece.

Rebel Dave

Man, what an awesome pistol and story! So jealous.....

Rebel Dave said:

Black powder is real easy to clean. Just use hot soapy water, in the barrel, and soak the cylinder, while you are cleaning the barrel. No big deal. You can actually clean BP faster than modern powder. You can even get by with one cleaning patch as your patch will come out clean, when the BBL, and cylinder are clean. Hold the gun upside down while cleaning the bbl, and the water will not go into the action. After its clean run some Balistol thu the barrel, and cylinder, and squirt some in the action also. Done.

Most black powder substitutes are highly corrosive, much more so than BP, especially Pyrodex, and Tripple 7, they are also harder to clean.

Don't be scared of BP. Most of what non BP users tell you is a myth. Shoot BP, and have fun, the way it was designed to.

I would not shoot ANY modern powder in that revolver, if you want to keep it in one piece.

Rebel Dave

Click to expand...

Dave said it well!

Another View ...

I have always avoided BP just because of the MESS.

After the first time watching my cousin & friends shooting their BP firearms about 25 years ago ... followed by The Cleanup Project (that began with someone walking back up to the house and returning with a 5gal buckets of hot water) ... I decided that not only would I not be adding Cap&Ball to my firearms repertoire, I was going to leave BP off the list entirely.

If I were handed an old family pistol like Paddy was, I would probably be tempted to try it with BP ... once ... if I could accomplish that relatively easily (like, find one of The Friends who was already reloading .32-20 BP cartridges).

After that I would plan on only shooting it with low-pressure "smokeless" loads (my choice would be Trailboss).

You can look around and finds some bullets intended for the .32/20 lubed with SPG lube.
I have a friend that shoots a number of BP cartridges and I started using SPG to accommodate him. It was a win win proposition as SPG is superior with smokeless powder, too.

Try Pyrodex P instead of 3F BP. It performs the same in cartridges, and a compressed load is needed just like BP to perform properly.

Congratulations on your legacy Colt. With a little load tweaking you'll minimixze the leading and improve the accuracy. .314" bullets lubed with SPG cast from soft lead or pure lead over a lightly compressed load of BP with a .060" fiber wad over the powder is usually a very accurate load.
Try some BP factory loads with BP as loaded for the cowboy action shooters.
That old Colt may very well suprise you at just how accurate it can be.

I've been loading/casting for nearly 50yrs. I've started playing with powder coating. It has its applications, but it's not a universal panacea for cast bullet performance. Just like those "new-fangled" jacketed bullets!
BP is best used as a system with those components that evolved with it and were refined to best function with it.
In otherwords, forgo the use of the PC BULLETS with BP.

I have my grand dads 1875 vintage .45 Colt and I shoot light loads of Trailboss in it with no problems. I have Black powder on hand but I don't want to deal with cleaning afterwards and the chance of not getting it clean enough and having it rust